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Abstract:

Print culture is an emerging field of enquiry enriched by a growing body of literature that
incorporates 'literacy studies', 'book history' and 'textual geography'. Print, language and
identity converged in convoluted ways. The printing press arrived at India's colonial
Northeast in 1836 not a revolutionary force per se; but it forged linkages with its oral
precedents. Oral tradition did not simply dissolve at the triumph of evangelical print culture.
Nonetheless, it eventually weakened the kinship complex of traditionai chiefdom while
spawning an embryonic middle class in the hill societies. The institutions of colonial reports
and ethnographic records also inscribed inscrutable kinship matrices into intelligible
'colonial tribes'. The tribe idea transcended earlier concepts of clan and kinship. The
technologies of writing and printing underpinned the formation of 'tribal'identity' under the
Raj. Under favourable context and scale, print technology contributes to the emergence of
privileged standard languages amidst Babel of tongues. The educated elite, in tum, often
militantly conflated their evolving literary language with a new community identity.
Moreover, ecclesiastical network and missionary magazines ironically nurtured a primitive
public sphere - tribal ecumene - among 'interpretive communities' under restrictive
colonial conditions. However limited the missionary literary lens might have been,
vernacular book readers (at least in colonial Mizoram) managed to construct an 'imaginative
geography' of their own 'homeland'. While the Mizos always had sentimental attachment to
old village sites at particular places, an abstract 'Mizo homeland' as a generalised idea
would have been irrelevant (if not unimaginable) in a pre-literate society. Through such
'ways of reading' the Word and the world, the educated elite harnessed aspects of old
altruistic traditions to new uses. But it also uncritically shared, especially through Bible
translation, sexist idioms and metaphors with pagan patriarchy. Ultimately, printing and
reading are sites of linguistic contest, identity invention and gender contention.